MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on in Scotland.
Leaders descend
AROUND Scotland is in Inverness this week, where the STUC is meeting for its 111th Congress. The extensive agenda of motions fully merits the congress themes of equality and justice.
It is a measure of the current political situation in Scotland that so many political heavyweights are heading up north to speak to Congress this year.
Once it was controversial for the STUC to hear an SNP politician or indeed any non-Labour parliamentarian.
Now, Labour is on the back foot. The party is out of power and in a quandary in Scotland. It appears to be busily squandering whatever political capital it may have left down south.
This week, we have Scotland's nationalist First Minister Alex Salmond speaking to the STUC. Congress will also hear John Swinney, a former SNP leader and now finance secretary in the Scottish government. Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander is speaking too.
And, on Monday morning, the Prime Minister is due to arrive fresh from his transatlantic trip.
Hopefully, they will all not just be speaking to congress, but listening to the democratic voice of Scotland's organised workers - always more trade unionist than UK unionist. Always more internationalist than Scottish nationalist.
Is there time for Labour to listen?
GEORGE W Bush. Wall Street bankers. The three US presidential hopefuls Barack, Hillary and John - they're on first name terms apparently. And the Scottish Trades Union Congress, collectively. Which of these would you tip a Labour Prime Minister to regard as their best friend?
Before Tony Blair, there could have been only one answer to that kind of question. But Blairism regarded unions as mere "producers' interests."
Well, producers with a vested interest the workers certainly are. For it is the workers in manufacturing and services, both public and private, who are struggling to produce a decent society, usually in the face of exploitation by the vested interests of capital to which Blair so vainly fawned.
Blair himself never thought that the Scottish workers represented by the STUC were significant enough to be a direct recipient of one of the public kickings that he would give to trade union conferences to prove his Thatcherite credentials.
Brown is not Blair, which remains a potentially redeeming feature, though he seems to be doing a good job of obliterating that potential.
He badly needs the money of trade union affiliates, since the millionaires appear no longer to be queuing up to bet on Labour.
But, even more, he needs the political support of exactly the core voters represented in the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness on Monday. The people's party needs the people!
What they are calling for is equality and justice.
Is there still time for Labour's leader to get the message?
Continuing in the tradition of the late, great McGahey
THE late and truly great Mick McGahey held the STUC in high regard.
I was lucky enough, along with Bill Speirs before he was even the deputy general secretary of the STUC, to interview McGahey just before he retired as president of the Scottish miners.
"The Scottish TUC is very powerful," McGahey told us. "It has played a remarkable role in the Scottish people's life and will continue to do so."
The difference between it and the TUC, he argued, was that the rank-and-file participated in the STUC through the trades councils, now rebranded as trade union councils but still constitutionally represented at congress.
"You get a shipyard worker, an engineering factory worker, an underground miner getting up and speaking, you get people who are on the shop floor, directly in the line of production, with all the problems we have got," McGahey pointed out.
Times change and there will be no working underground miners speaking this year, I think.
But there will be engineers and shipbuilders, care workers and teachers, call centre workers and civil servants and many more from the rank and file.
I expect them to continue in the tradition that McGahey regarded so highly and speak truth to power.
Dirty business at the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency
I WROTE about the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) dispute here a few weeks ago.
The Victorian-style management at the public body had issued workers with dismissal notices because they didn't agree with the unilateral imposition of changes to their pay and conditions.
Nearly 800 UNISON members who work for SEPA across Scotland are currently being balloted on industrial action.
Staff have previously recorded an overwhelming 93 per cent vote of no confidence in the board and management following SEPA attempts to pressure them into signing away their rights. There have also been more than 200 individual grievances lodged.
UNISON branch secretary Alan Fleming says that the union "will not allow members to be bullied and brow-beaten."
Rightly so. The ballot is due to close on Friday. I hope that the SEPA workers feel confident enough to vote for action.
My 10p's worth
NOT all STUC delegates will be workers paying just the 10p rate of tax. Some will be for sure.
But none of the delegates and none of the workers and communities that they represent will want to vote for a Labour government which deliberately acts to make the poorest workers worse off to fund tax relief for those earning more.
For my 10 pence worth, I think that Brown has got this even more wrong than the "insulting" 75p pensions rise early in his Treasury career, which even he eventually admitted had been a mistake.
He'd get at least one cheer if he used the congress in Inverness to announce a compensation package to ensure that no-one loses out from the removal of the 10p band.
It's not often that I agree with Frank Field, but there you are.
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